It’s impossible to escape these two letters anywhere you turn at the moment and undoubtedly the potential for AI to dramatically enhance what we do at work and at home is enormous. What I’ve observed in many cases after speaking to people in business is some level of tendency to put the cart before the horse, with emphasis on choosing the tools and setting up subscriptions before actually determining the problem thats trying to be solved or the direction you’re heading. This has manifest in several organisations I’ve worked with, e.g. ‘We’re buying full chat GPT licenses for everyone in the organisation….’. OK that’s great but what are you wanting people to do with that and how are you going to measure the ROI of doing that.

A better place to start is to get clarity on what are the problem areas, or opportunities you are looking to solve for, e.g. do you want a faster and more effective way to query records that you may have a on a spreadsheet somewhere. Do you want help managing your email inbox so you’re not drowning in communications. This step is key as you can then start to hone in on what tools, what data might be needed and what prompting approach to build your AI solution.

A better place to start is to get clarity on what are the problem areas, or opportunities you are looking to solve for………..you can then start to hone in on what tools, what data might be needed and what prompting approach to build your AI solution

AI is an enabler for helping to execute change, and the reason that it’s so powerful is that it is now enabling single users to do things that would previously have required multiple, often specialist resources to achieve. It however needs to be driven by a human at the start of the process that is able to articulate what the problem / challenge / opportunity is and what they would ideally like to achieve and then be able to break this down into understandable chunks of information.

Two examples where I’ve used AI recently, firstly and organisation I worked with kept all their records of trainers that delivered their courses on a number of different sources, some on spreadsheets, some on systems. What the client needed was an app that would suck in this information from different sources, and provide a front end for a user so that they could input some criteria that would determine the trainer profile that was needed and then be returned a list of suitably qualified (and available) people that could fulfil that need. In this case Google’s AI Studio provided the basis for this and it was very easy to turn this into a prototype app.

It’s easy with AI to be fearful of getting behind so feeling that doing something is better than nothing, but also it’s important that in utilising AI your business is getting true value form it and it’s not just another thing to do, or a different way of doing things which is still not as efficient/effective as it should be. That risk is very real.

See AI as the powerful enabler that didn’t exist before

In summary, don’t rush in to AI and get everyone licenses for or take quals in the first tool you’ve heard of. Carefully and methodically identify your business’s pain points and think about what in an ideal world you would have instead, how should the process work, what problems are happening in the process at the moment. When you’re clear on this you can start to search which AI tools are out there that could help, then start to commit some time learning about those tools/platforms. You’ll find many have free trials or credits to help get you started so you can start to explore what might be feasible without committing any spend or doing any lengthy vendor selection processes.